This invention relates to the field of communications. More particularly, an apparatus and methods are provided for indicating the receipt of a communication.
Various devices and methods have been introduced for the purpose of notifying a person that a telephonic message has been received for him or her. Answering machines, for example, typically indicate the receipt of a message by flashing a light and/or displaying the number of messages.
The advent of network-based voice-mail service has made it somewhat more difficult to provide an easy, simple and fast way to notify a person that he or she has received a message. With network-based voice-mail service, the person's messages are stored in a remote location operated by the provider of the voice-mail service (e.g., the person's local telephone company). Unlike with an answering machine, with network-based voice-mail service there are no means of quickly (e.g., visually) alerting a person to the receipt of a message. Typically the person must take his or her telephone off-hook to test for a stutter-tone that indicates receipt of a message.
This requires proactive effort by a person, in contrast to simply looking at a visual indicator, is not as easy, and may not be possible at all times. In particular, because the person must physically access a telephone he or she cannot test for stutter-tone when traveling or otherwise away from the telephone.
Another problem with many existing systems for indicating message-waiting status is that they do not function if a person's telephone line is in use. A person cannot test his telephone line for stutter-tone while using it to talk to someone, access the Internet, etc.
Further, stutter-tone is line-specific in that from one telephone a person can only check for messages waiting in a voice-mail system for that telephone line. While at work, a person cannot check for messages received by her residential telephone service, and vice versa.
Many message waiting indication systems are thus dependent upon or tied to calls to or from a particular telephone line, place (e.g., residence, office) and/or device (e.g., a specific telephone). As a result, indicating receipt of a message for a user of a central (e.g., network-based) voice-mail service generally requires the user to adopt new behavior and/or pay extra money for specialized notification services or systems.
Even the user of pager notifications to alert someone that he or she has received a voice-mail message has disadvantages. For example, a paging system may require manual deactivation, in that the person may be required to take some action (e.g., save or delete the message) in order to avoid being paged multiple times for a single message. Further, in order for a pager to inform a person of messages on more than one telephone line or at multiple locations, the pager or pager service must be configured separately for each line or location.
Therefore, what is needed is an apparatus and method of notifying someone of the receipt of a voice-mail message for him or her. The apparatus should be portable, easy to use and should not be limited to use at just one location or with just one telephone or telephone line. The apparatus should be configurable in as few steps (e.g., one) as possible, and it may be desirable for the apparatus to be automatically deactivated when a message is retrieved.